Citi has expanded its Citi OpenInvestor suite of investment services to include segregated collateral custody accounts to help clients better mitigate counterparty risk, provide asset safety, and improve collateral efficiency. This new capability adds to Citi’s existing agency collateral management service, OpenCollateral. Responding to emerging regulatory requirements, the new service helps its clients to support new requirements under Dodd-Frank and European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) rules.

"The offering is really designed to help people deal with the new requirements around custody of OTC segregated accounts, it came out of a need our clients were experiencing," Fergus Pery, Director and Product Head for OpenCollateral, part of Citi's Securities and Fund Services, told Opalesque.

"The challenge for many clients is trying to understand how the OTC segregated account requirements are going to work. One of the big issue is scalability of these accounts."

For tri-party account control arrangements (ACA), Citi will act as an intermediary between the pledgor and the secured party, holding pledged collateral in a segregated custody account. Within the terms of each ACA, Citi’s new solutions allow pledgors to instruct transactions on the collateral account and secured parties to monitor pledged collateral positions in an automated manner.

There will be three core functions of the new suite, including featur......................